"You're in a fundamental situation here where, whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you," said Musk. "You either fight back or you die."
Pretty much every atrocity in history that I know of has included a framing of "we must defend ourselves against $evil_group, we have no choice, it's them or us". A framing of victimhood – whether real or not – and need of defence is always a big part of the justification of denying the rights, or even killing, of $evil_group. Maybe there are exceptions, but I'm not aware of them.
The right-wing persecution complex is not a new phenomenon. Bill O'Reilly and the likes were constantly going on about it in the 90s, and Jerry Falwell's "Moral Majority" – which more or less created the Christian Right – already had elements of it in the 80s. But this really takes things to a new level, and is at least potentially laying the groundwork for something rather ugly.
What still shocks me — though maybe it shouldn’t at this point — is that the richest man in the world is seemingly an out-and-proud white supremacist, with direct personal and financial ties to far-right groups across numerous countries, and this barely gets a peep in the news or on HN whenever the latest Tesla/Grok/SpaceX press release is disseminated. In fact, mentions of this on HN are usually just flagged and killed, as if it’s somehow irrelevant.
As far as I’m concerned, every single Musk-related article should be prefaced with "and just as a reminder, the owner of this product is a (no longer closeted) white supremacist who spends his free time promoting things like remigration and taking down the 'liberal state' by violent force."
Yeah, I don't really get that either, especially since Musk is still so involved in these companies.
But Musk is hardly a unique case, and his racism is just part of the "Make Racism Great Again" movement that has, especially over the last year or so, become exceedingly explicit. You can see this here on HN as well.
Because of Musk's alignment with the 'Christian' right which has tight links with the brains trust behind Farage - the European Research Group (with its religion well hidden to outsiders - and invisible to journalists). This is a global Christo-Fascist project, little diff. at this point between the governments of about 20 nations.
Transnational political platforming, intervention, and support of extremists terrorists to takeover social democracies and replace them the ideological, totalitarian regimes friendly to North Korea, China, and Russia by twisting populist ethno-nationalist sentiment into essentially absolute power for a small subset of the ultra rich. The fundamental, hubristic miscalculation is that it's impossible to fool all of the people all of the time.
You could ask the same thing about HN in general. There’s an interest in the UK that’s disproportionate to the country’s global influence or to the number of British HNers. As best I can understand, a particular negative outlook on the UK has become central to certain currents of right wing thought in the US. I suppose it’s convenient to paint a one-sided picture of the UK for the purposes of political rhetoric, as most of the audience won’t have the first hand knowledge required to evaluate it critically.
I think that he wrongly believes, because of his self-created social media bubble, that there's a like-minded majority of people everywhere who want white people back on top of a hierarchy, and if he can just tip things a little bit he can make it happen and he be a great hero for leading it.
I hate to point to people's family but since he has seemingly doubled down on their views I think it's ok to point out his grandparents were pro-Nazi in Canada and moved to South Africa BECAUSE OF apartheid. It's not surprising if he was raised with some strange extreme views
Also we have a lot of anti immigrant type activists speaking the same language as the the American ones on twitter/x. The Americans tend to take a rather simplistic view of England as a formerly great place being taken over by islam. England does have its issues but the reality is more complicated and subtle than you'd think going off twitter. Like it's a bit early to dissolve parliament when we only voted the current lot in last year.
If anyone honest and rational needed additional proof beyond a "Roman" salute that certain billionaires aren't fans of democracy or were deftly able to manipulate white supremacists like US plantation owners did 2 centuries ago. History shows it always seems to end after another Civil or World War.
The UK is arresting people for social media posts at a staggering rate, and has long given up on free speech as policy. Additionally, the UK Labour party sent staffers to the US to campaign for the US Democrats, a blatantly illegal interference in US politics.
The UK is no longer a functioning democracy but more like a failed state clinging to mass censorship while trying to prevent complete collapse.
For these reasons there should be a political change.
I guess our version of ‘mass censorship’ is to allow 150,000 people to protest in our capital city while calling for the violent overthrow of the present government.
Racist hate-monger.